It’s hard to make something from scratch. When my wife lets me in front of the stove, I often use mixes and other ready-made items to help ensure that dinner doesn’t turn into a disaster. Plus, it’s a lot easier than doing all the work by myself.

Piggybacking on hot topics and content is
an excellent way to expand the reach
of your own content.

As content marketers, we can also benefit from some help. It’s not easy to generate buzz from scratch with a white paper, article or even a news release. There is a lot of competition out there, and as much as we would like people to be clamoring to read our content, that's not always the case.

Fortunately, we can use existing buzz to help create our own. This is the idea behind newsjacking, made popular by David Meerman Scott in his book "Newsjacking." He demonstrated how content marketers can ride the wave of publicity of news events through using these steps:

Find a newsworthy event that is relevant

Create high-quality content that both furthers the marketer’s agenda and relates to the news

Release the content when the news is hot, doing so in an outlet where the news, and your content, will be found.

Newsjacking has become a successful and established content marketing strategy. To learn more about it and view success stories, check out these resources from the Content Marketing Institute and HubSpot.

There are some limitations with newsjacking. 1. We don’t know how hot a news story will be, so we have to try to predict what to newsjack. 2. Newsjacking, to an extent, has become a victim of its own popularity. Events that are sure to be hot will have many people trying to newsjack them, so the benefits of doing so are limited.

An excellent complement to newsjacking is topicjacking. The idea is to discover a topic that is related to the one we are writing about that is already popular. We then identify content that was shared and/or authored by someone with influence on the topic, and link to that content from our content. When we publish our content, we tweet the author(s) and leave comments on related highly shared blogs, linking to our content. (Important note: Don’t hijack content. Be sure to always give credit to the author(s) and link to the source.)

This makes the people reading those blogs and following those authors more likely to view our content, for we are adding to the conversation taking place about the trending topic. In this way, we add to our reach and to our social influence.

To get the best results, we want to topicjack repeatedly. To do so, at minimum we need a real-time index of relevant trending topics and profiles of authors writing or sharing news about those topics. SocialEars HR provides this information, and gives you two other excellent topicjacking tools: the ability to analyze your own content to find popular related topics and measurement of your own current digital influence and reach.